A review by Jason McQuinn

One more sign of the ongoing revival of interest in the still-generally-ignored seminal writings of Max Stirner is the appearance of the first collection of essays to be published in the English language on the subject of his life and work. You can bet it won’t be the last. The title itself, simply Max Stirner, gives little indication of the specific intent or content of the collection. But the publisher is Palgrave Macmillan, an academic imprint for Macmillan Publishers in the UK and St. Martin’s Press in the US, indicating that the aim here is an academic – rather than explicitly partisan, polemical or critical – work. It has been published as the first text of a series of “Critical Explorations In Contemporary Political Thought,” whose “aim…is to provide authoritative guides to the work of contemporary political thinkers, or thinkers with a strong resonance in the present, in the form of an edited collection of scholarly essays.” Given this ingenuous series description, it has to be pointed out that it is absurd to present the book as an “authoritative guide” to the writings of a man who would likely more than anyone else refuse the very possibility. This is, unfortunately, only the first of many indications of the uneven nature and quality of this collection. By now, rather than empty “authoritative” pretensions, it should be clear that any serious Stirner scholarship requires a large amount of humility in the face of all the historical incomprehension and mystification Stirner’s work has already received from the academy.

The editor of the collection is Saul Newman, an academic known in libertarian circles mostly for his advocacy of what he calls “post-anarchism” (sometimes considered short for “post-structuralist anarchism”). Post-anarchism in practice entails a mishmash of often awkward attempts at a philosophical synthesis of post-structuralist or post-modernist theories – especially Foucault’s – with schematic, heavily theoretical and largely leftist versions of anarchism. Most often in these syntheses, post-structuralist currents end up in the dominant position, in charge of reforming a post-modernist anarchism from a heavily caricatured essentialist, modernist past. Somewhat incongruously, some of Max Stirner’s ideas also often figure in the “post-anarchist” stews, especially in Saul Newman’s variation. However, Newman’s own post-anarchist position (in which Stirner is elsewhere touted as a “proto-poststructuralist thinker”) does not appear to be consistently shared by other contributors to the volume reviewed, thus occasionally leaving rather large leaps in commitments and theoretical positions between any one essay and the next. On the whole this seems to be a positive point for the book, allowing those neither interested in nor convinced by post-anarchist perspectives to share other perspectives on Stirner in this eclectic academic mix. Given the variety of perspectives expressed in the texts that make up this volume, it makes sense to separate them out in order to give each author, however briefly, his and her due, beginning with the editor’s introduction.

“Re-encountering Stirner’s Ghosts” by Saul Newman

Apparently in deference to Derrida’s dominant (though somewhat incoherent) trope in Specters of Marx, the title of Newman’s introduction, “Re-encountering Stirner’s Ghosts,” seems at least in part intended (among other contradictory intentions) to imply that the “ghosts” Stirner exposes in Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (which I will translate here as The Unique and Its Own¹) also haunt and/or obsess Stirner personally² (rather than haunting and obsessing instead only the great mass of deluded individuals who themselves take these “ghosts” for real, external powers instead of imagined constructions of their own self-alienated powers.) Or that even Stirner himself somehow “haunts” readers! However useful and accurate it might be to portray Karl Marx as still haunted by such “specters,” it doesn’t make any real sense in the case of Stirner, as any careful reading of The Unique and Its Own will reveal. And, beyond this, when Newman later (p. 3) suggests: “Stirner has never ceased to be a ghost,” we would do better to read: “Stirner has never ceased being reduced to a ghost” by idealists and religious rationalists of all types – including post-structuralists. It is otherwise clear from Stirner’s own words that he personally has no cares nor worries from all the ghosts that the vast masses of people are always so busy constructing to haunt themselves. In fact, as Stirner announces, his concerns are completely beyond and outside of any ghostly or spiritual concerns. They are purely his own concerns. Nor does it make much sense to cast Stirner himself as a metaphorical ghost for his readers just because we know so few details of his life or because most of his readers show little or no understanding of his texts. Or even because Stirner’s critiques are not so easily dismissed as most of his critics at first seem to believe, often returning to trouble even their most careful philosophical, religious or moral calculations. These poorly-aimed hauntological³ rhetorical moves by Newman will most likely just lead more people into even more confusion that could instead be relieved with a bit more serious, observant – and logical – research and analysis. At the least, it should be realized by commentators that the haphazard blending of Stirner’s careful critique of spirits/ghosts/the uncanny with Derrida’s intentionally vague and capricious trope will never be likely to lead to an increased understanding of Stirner when there are already so many mystifications of Stirner’s arguments that readers must sort through without having any more added.

However, despite the questionable preconceptions and rhetorical conceits involved in Newman’s post-structuralist, post-anarchist perspective, he does manage to provide – for one very brief stretch – what could have been the beginning of an exemplary introduction to the volume when he argues:

“… In marking a break with all established categories and traditions of thought – Hegelianism, humanism, rationalism – and in demolishing our most deeply entrenched notions of morality, subjectivity, humanity and society, Stirner takes a wrecking ball to the philosophical architecture of our Western tradition, leaving only ruins in his path. All our beliefs are dismissed by Stirner as so many ideological abstractions, ‘spooks,’ ‘fixed ideas’: our faith in rationality is shown to be no less superstitious than faith in the most obfuscating of religions. Man is simply God reinvented; secular institutions and discourses are alive with specters of Christianity; universalism is spoken from a particular position of power. Stirner tears up the paving stones of our world, revealing the abyss of nothingness that lies beneath.” (p. 1)

Newman is at his best at moments like this when obfuscatory post-structuralist terminology is left behind for plain old English, and when his cloudy references to obscure (for non-academic readers) French theorists like Lacan, Foucault and Derrida evaporate, momentarily leaving us with relatively transparent prose under clear blue skies. Newman’s remarks above make it hard for anyone familiar with Stirner to object. Stirner clearly breaks with any and “all established categories and traditions of thought.” He certainly demolishes every “entrenched notion.” Stirner even “takes a wrecking ball to the philosophical architecture of our Western tradition” – Newman here interestingly echoes (Stirner-influenced) Feral Faun’s old essay title: “Radical Theory: A Wrecking Ball for Ivory Towers.” (4) (Though Newman also seems oblivious to the implications his own position as one of the minor “philosophers” of that very architecture – himself inhabiting one of the lesser “Ivory Towers.”) Newman’s perspective on Stirner’s “wrecking ball” may also seem somewhat limited if confined to “our Western tradition,” when there should be no reason to regard its effects as being confined to a single tradition, especially since Stirner’s work is not unknown among Eastern philosophers (see, for example, works by members of the Japanese Kyoto School like Nishida Kitaro and Kieji Nishitani), nor was Eastern thought unknown to Stirner.

The otherwise promising opening of Newman’s introduction is unfortunately ruined when he concludes his first paragraph with the standard howler of Stirner (pseudo-) scholarship.

“All that is left standing after this frenzy of destruction is the Ego – the only reality – smiling at us enigmatically, like Stirner himself, across the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to our present day.” (p.1)

Because this howler is so often repeated in so much of the heretofore persistently incompetent “scholarship” on Stirner it requires a fair bit of unavoidable explanation. (5)

This statement might make some sense if Stirner had actually written anything in his masterwork suggesting that a concept of “the Ego” could ever be “the only reality.” But he didn’t. Nor does he ever suggest that such a concept would be “left standing” after his destruction of – and exit from – philosophy. In The Unique and Its Own, Stirner neither speaks of any generic concept of “the Ego” in those words, nor even of “the I” at all in any positive, uncritical way. Nor, for that matter, did Stirner ever suggest that “the only reality” could ever possibly lie in any generic or universal conception at all. Stirner is, on the contrary, quite clear that it is only I, “the Unique,” who am both “all and nothing.” That is, it is myself only as indefinable, nonconceptual, actually-lived I who am all. And there can be no possible concept (thought), even the completely and transparently nominal (and thus “empty”) concept of “the Unique” that actually has any real, independent, living existence for me. In order for academic scholarship on Stirner to finally exit its self-prolonged dark age, it will have to at the very least begin from this minimal understanding instead of perpetually recapitulating the unfounded confusion between I, “the Unique” (Stirner’s name suggesting his entire nonconceptual life-process, including his entire world as it is lived) and “the I” or “the Ego” (as generic, determinate concepts, however they may be defined). Currently we have entered well within the second half of the second century of pseudo-scholarly mystification on this point, extending from Stirner’s earliest critics all the way to contemporary liberal, Marxist, and now post-structuralist critics. Can’t we all at last drop these mystifying references to “the ego” that Stirner never advocated – at least in essays and books claiming to explore Stirner’s writings?

In The Unique and Its Own, Stirner neither speaks of any generic concept of “the Ego” in those words, nor even of “the I” at all in any positive, uncritical way. Nor, for that matter, did Stirner ever suggest that “the only reality” could ever possibly lie in any generic or universal conception at all. Stirner is, on the contrary, quite clear that it is only I, “the Unique,” who am both “all and nothing.” That is, it is myself only as indefinable, nonconceptual, actually-lived I who am all. And there can be no possible concept (thought), even the completely and transparently nominal (and thus “empty”) concept of “the Unique” that actually has any real, independent, living existence for me. In order for academic scholarship on Stirner to finally exit its self-prolonged dark age, it will have to at the very least begin from this minimal understanding instead of perpetually recapitulating the unfounded confusion between I, “the Unique” and “the I” or “the Ego”.

Newman goes on to correctly stress that “Stirner is a thinker who defies easy categorization” (p. 2) and that he has had a profound impact – an “often shattering impact – on the trajectory of social and political theory.” (p. 2) But just as Newman opens an opportunity to expose not just Karl Marx’s squirming attempt in The German Ideology “to exorcise the spectre of idealism from his own thought by claiming to find it in Stirner’s” (p. 2), but more importantly Marx’s ultimate failure in this attempt, he stops short. Newman shows no understanding that although Marx might have attempted to escape from his humanism and idealism due to his “encounter with Stirner,” he in fact failed to escape, succeeding only in masking his humanism and idealism in a more obscure and mystifying manner. Given the inclusion of Paul Thomas’ expectedly pro-Marxist and anti-Stirner interpretation of the Stirner-Marx encounter in this anthology, it isn’t clear how much Newman’s subtle whitewashing of Marx is just being politic with a contributor, or how much Newman himself remains in thrall to (ultimately idealist) Marxist categories of philosophical or dialectical materialism. As is so often the case with commentators on Stirner, Marx escapes any but the most toothless of criticisms when any half-way consistent application of Stirner’s critique to Marxist categories would easily expose their pious nature.

Newman states that he “…prefer(s) to see Stirner as a tool to be used, as a means of forcing apart the tectonic plates of our world and destabilizing the institutions and identities that rest upon them.” (p. 4) And this is a perfectly good use of Stirner’s work. Yet, Newman also makes it clear over and over again in his introduction that he will not allow himself to understand Stirner (or use this “tool”) outside of the categories of post-structuralist philosophy. The (minor) “tectonic plates” of post-structuralism and post-modernism must not themselves be destabilized. Stirner can and will be used by Newman as a tool in their service, but never as a source for potentially autonomous criticism outside of – and far more radical than – the philosophical and religious preconceptions and limits of post-structuralist and post-modernist ideologues like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze. Newman will “…conjure up Stirner’s ghost,” but not allow that such conjuring is a recuperation and mystification of Stirner’s exit from every category of religion, philosophy and ideology, not just from the range of categories that Newman himself is currently ready to leave behind.

“A Solitary Life” by David Leopold

To whatever extent David Leopold’s condescending – and at times bizarre – biographical sketch of Max Stirner’s life is actually meant to provide a “Historical Context” (p. 19) for understanding Stirner and his texts, as the book’s section title would appear to indicate, it certainly fails in reaching beyond fairly immediate circumstances. What can be said about a biography – of a widely misunderstood, occasionally celebrated though often denounced or reviled, but incredibly creative, controversial and powerful figure in the history of ideas and their criticism – that ignores just about every avenue for exploring the relation of the historical context of Stirner’s writing to the meanings and understanding of his texts besides those few already well-traveled? Leopold could have at least attempted to give readers a brief picture of the social, economic, political, or at least the philosophical and cultural context of post-revolutionary Europe, Vormärz Germany, and especially Berlin in which Stirner lived and wrote. Instead, Leopold is content to merely summarize the standard biographical details easily available from John Henry Mackay’s works on Stirner’s life, along with emphasizing a few relatively salacious tidbits of unsubstantiated gossip and rumor about the author’s marriages, sex life, occasional penury, and even the location of his skull! In addition, he occasionally adds a few of his own speculations along with the extraneous comments of others concerning side questions whose relevance to an account of Stirner’s life and writings might better have been left for footnotes. Any broad consideration of the intellectual context of the times is especially absent. Although Leopold could hardly have avoided mention of contemporary Hegelians and post-Hegelians with whom Stirner associated, there is not a single mention of the German Romantics; of important German philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Johann Fichte or Schelling; or even of such an epochal event as the French Revolution in this account. Leopold uses more space to recount and speculate about the life and bitter comments of Stirner’s ex-wife (made more than 50 years after their separation!) than he does to recount the history and content of all of Stirner’s sixty articles published immediately prior to The Unique and Its Own! Leopold seems somewhat uncertain here whether he’s writing for a scholarly tome or the tabloid press, and thus succeeds at neither. Readers hoping for more light to be shed on Stirner through an examination of the “historical context” of his life and works will be left wondering what Leopold was thinking when he wrote this essay. We can only hope that the next person to take up the challenge will approach it more seriously.

“The Mirror of Anarchy: The Egoism of John Henry Mackay and Dora Marsden” by Ruth Kinna

Ruth Kinna examines the real-existing “egoism” of John Henry Mackay and Dora Marsden within and at the margins of the libertarian milieu at the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries. She further situates her examination within terms of recent differences between Alan Antliff and Saul Newman regarding the relation of anarchism to post-structuralism. Although both Mackay and Marsden are interesting figures with genuine achievements, they are also both marginalized – when not completely ignored – within ideologically leftist, including left anarchist, accounts of libertarian history and thought. Despite Kinna’s seeming enthusiasm for Newman’s narrowly post-structuralist reading of Stirner, she shows a welcome openness to the lives and texts of Mackay and Marsden that allows them to speak for themselves rather than as puppets of post-structuralism or of the “Stirnerism” that they represent for her. Kinna, citing Antliff’s critique of Newman, takes a step towards exposing the importance of the wide-ranging and broadly multiplicitous forms and expressions anarchism has taken throughout its existence. But, though these examinations of Mackay and Marsden are genuinely interesting and a pleasure to read, they actually shine little light on the understanding of Stirner’s writings. Kinna indicates this herself when she ventures: “How far either Mackay or Marsden faithfully interpreted Stirner is a moot point.” This can also be a warning for those not already alert to the fact that egoism is not a settled, agreed phenomenon and not all self-appointed or alleged “egoists” share anything like the same perspective. But even non-Stirnerian egoists can hold a “mirror to anarchy” and provide worthwhile, sometimes life-changing, insights.

“The Multiplicity of Nothingness: A Contribution to a Non-reductionist Reading of Stirner” by Riccardo Baldissone

One of the two most interesting contributions – one of the two real reasons for picking up this book – is Riccardo Baldissone’s “non-reductionist reading” of Stirner. Even though it’s actually not a “non-reductionist” reading except through a strange and playful bit of pomo logic. It’s actually an anachronistic reading of Stirner according to more common logic and word usage. But I won’t quibble too much here, since the result is a sophisticated, sometimes insightful, and most often enjoyable romp through history making connections in both directions – forwards and back – between Stirner and later forebears or his earlier successors. Precisely because of its explicit playfulness, Baldissone can get away with revealing revealing connections that may not technically exist in our usual reality, but still can exist just the same by his and our making them. However, just as Kinna’s examinations of Mackay and Marsden (while interesting for unraveling a few of the complex relations of egoism and anarchism) don’t add much to our understanding of Stirner’s writings themselves, Baldissone’s anarchronistic connections are read loosely enough that what they reveal doesn’t always add that much either. Except that Baldissone already begins his reading from a more profound understanding of Stirner’s Einzige (“Unique”) that allows him to focus on far more interesting aspects of these connections than we would otherwise expect! Especially worthwhile here, are his discussions of the nonconceptual nature, the radical openness, and the “multiple monstrosity” of Stirner’s egoist critique, which most often demand that he be at least fundamentally misunderstood, when not outright ignored, ridiculed or demonized by all those complicit in the culture of modern slavery. Among other authors, Baldissone covers – sometimes all too briefly – connections between Stirner and Gilles Deleuze, Ivan Illich, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Marx, Sorel, Hegel (here mentioning Lawrence Stepelevich’s “truly remarkable essay ‘Max Stirner as Hegelian’”), Kant, and the “western Church Fathers.” In passing Baldissone argues that “Stirner’s implacable indictment of ideas cannot be brought back under the umbrella of critique,” though in doing so he ignores that Stirner does make a distinction between ideological (“servile”) criticism – which always involves substituting one fixed idea or presupposition for another – and “own criticism.” But in the main Baldissone has launched a nicely provocative attack on (the generally sub-) standard Stirner scholarship in a very encouraging manner!

“The Philosophical Reactionaries” translated and introduced by Widukind De Ridder

The other major reason to pick up this book is the inclusion of two contributions from Widukind De Ridder – the first an introduction to and translation of Stirner’s response to his critic Kuno Fischer, and the second a longer commentary on “The End of Philosophy and Political Subjectivity” a bit later in the collection. De Ridder’s introduction, by giving no opinion, is much too easy on skepticism about Stirner’s authorship of “The Philosophical Reactionaries,” (which was originally attributed to “G. Edward”). Given that the essay was published by the same person (Otto Wigand) who published Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum itself, his publisher could hardly have been unaware of the identity of the “G. Edward” responding to Stirner’s critics, yet never gave (nor did Stirner himself give) any indication it wasn’t Stirner. But De Ridder shows the most insight into the intentions and implications of Stirner’s writings of all contributors to this volume. So it is only fitting that he has provided the first full English translation of “The Philosophical Reactionaries” here, a very valuable and essential text giving a final response to a critic, following the original “Stirner’s Critics” reply to Feuerbach, Moses Hess and Szeliga. As De Ridder indicates, the timing of this response offers “a unique insight into Stirner’s own appraisal of [his] book in the wake of the ultimate demise of Young Hegelianism.” (p. 89) An appraisal that allowed Stirner “to emphasize how [his] criticism of humanism was eventually a criticism of philosophy itself.” (p. 92) Stirner makes short work of the young Fischer in the text, with slashing wit that leaves Fischer and all of philosophy abandoned in the dust.

“Max Stirner and Karl Marx: An Overlooked Contretemps” by Paul Thomas

“Stirner’s work has always been a special target for Marxist damnation, given its overt challenge to every form of ideology, including all Marxist ideologies. But ever since Karl Marx’s German Ideology was published the clash between Stirner and Marx has taken on ever more importance.”

Stirner’s work has always been a special target for Marxist damnation, given its overt challenge to every form of ideology, including all Marxist ideologies. But ever since Karl Marx’s failed materialist attack on Stirner in The German Ideology was finally published in 1932 the clash between Stirner and Marx has taken on ever more importance for defenders of Marxism. As a result we have seen a continuing stream of (usually off-hand and well off-base) Marxist critiques of Stirner appear, most of which borrow heavily from Marx’s own early misinterpretations of Stirner’s work. Paul Thomas’ critique of Stirner is little different – though a little more intelligent than most – in this respect. Thomas has at least a small ability to occasionally give Stirner some token credit for a few of his critical contributions. In general, though, Thomas insists on agressively following Marx’s lead in reducing Stirner’s work to an idealistic caricature constructed from dialectical materialist categories. Rather than ever allow Stirner to make points on his own, Thomas slavishly interprets Stirner’s every move in terms of an original Marxist incomprehension that defies logic, but serves the purpose of protecting Marxist ideological clichés from Stirner’s actual criticisms. There’s really no excuse for including this completely out-of-place text in this collection.

“Max Stirner: The End of Philosophy and Political Subjectivity” by Widukind De Ridder

The second of Widukind De Ridder’s valuable contributions to this volume makes the hard-to-avoid argument that Stirner’s critique inevitably leads to a refusal of philosophy. Although this refusal was mostly implicit in Stirner’s The Unique and Its Own, Stirner made it impossible to ignore in “The Philosophical Reactionaries.” This means that it is at least problematic to include Stirner as one of the “Young Hegelians,” as though he shared an essentially similar relation to Hegelian philosophy as the others so classified, like Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer. And it certainly means, as De Ridder argues, that Stirner’s “ideas cannot be reduced to a traditional philosophy of the subject (existentialism),” and that his writings “not only question the revolutionary subject in a strictly Marxist sense, but eventually any form of (political) subjectivity.” (p. 143) De Ridder further notes that “For Stirner the crisis of the estate order [in Vormärz Prussia] calls neither for a new synthesis nor a new philosophy of the self, but necessitates new ways of transcending the political and societal horizon as a whole.” (p. 145) And Stirner does this by “dissolv[ing] existing philosophical categories by contrasting them with concepts that lay explicitly beyond philosophy.” (p. 145) These latter “concepts” outside philosophy include the “Unique,” “ownness” and “egoism.” The bulk of De Ridder’s arguments cover the conflict between the development of Bruno Bauer’s immanent philosophical critique of Hegel and Stirner’s “parody of the Young Hegelian quest to identify a modern political subject.” This makes fascinating reading, especially since Bauer himself has been so rarely translated and studied in English-language scholarship, despite his great importance for post-Hegelian critiques. De Ridder concludes that Stirner’s Unique “is fundamentally extra-conceptual. Stirner’s radical nominalism places the concept of [the “Unique”] outside of philosophy and destroys the subject-object dichotomy.” (p. 157)

“Why Anarchists need Stirner” by Kathy E. Ferguson

Kathy Ferguson uses Schmidt and van der Walt’s ill-conceived Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (already notorious for its extremely narrow and ideological syndicalism) as a foil for arguments in favor of a Stirnerian theoretical and practical autonomy. But she works at this, rather peculiarly (for an anarchist), through use of analyses of the somewhat popular (in leftist circles) post-Stalinist Slavoj Žižek. Thus, while the initial impulse seems worthwhile, the value of “Why anarchists need Stirner” is somewhat mitigated for those who know Stirner well, because Ferguson both undercuts the premise with widely misplaced praise for the “otherwise excellent book on global anarchism and syndicalism, Black Flame,” at the same time that she insists on using an anti-anarchist, pro-Leninist critic (Žižek) to help explain a Stirner with whom he is completely at odds. Still, despite these problems, the essay is largely successful despite itself. But this is probably because (except when Stirner is successfully misrepresented) anti-Stirner arguments are almost guaranteed to fail when directed at anarchists who value their theoretical and practical autonomy. Ideologists like Schmidt and van der Walt, and all the others whose leftism far outweighs any commitment to libertarian values, might as well give up their crusade. Until they can fully detach practical autonomy from anarchism – an impossible feat, without destroying the anarchist impulse itself – they are doomed to a self-delusionally revisionist battle against any and every actually-existing anarchist.

“Stirner’s Ethics of Voluntary Inservitude” by Saul Newman

Saul Newman saves his own most valuable work for the final contribution to this volume, in which he compares Max Stirner’s arguments for insurrectionary insubordination to Étienne de la Boëtie’s earlier critique of “voluntary servitude,” although, unfortunately, Newman once again misrepresents Stirner by focusing on “the singularity of the individual ego” instead of on Stirner’s nonconceptual “Unique.” Despite the clear exposition of Stirner’s critique of philosophy raised by Widukind de Ridder in his two contributions to this book, Newman still insists on describing “Stirner’s philosophical project … as one of clearing the ontological ground of all essential foundations.” (p. 204) But he clearly has no “philosophical project.” As he tirelessly repeats, his is not a project of the individual or the ego, but of his own! Newman is at least correct, though, that one of Stirner’s big contributions “is to point out the futility of founding political action on metphysical ideas of human nature, science, historical laws and assumptions about a shared rationality and morality.” (p. 206)

Notes

1. This is the title for a current CAL Press project-in-process to publish a revised (corrected) edition of the Steven Byington translation of Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum that dispenses with the disastrous confusion between Stirner’s “Einzige” and “the Ego” that Benjamin Tucker’s title and Byingon’s text have introduced and reinforced. Also underway is Wolfi Landstreicher’s completely new translation, which should also help immensely to clear up this confusion, slated to appear under the more literal title as The Unique and Its Property.

2. Newman comments, “…just as we think we have [Stirner] pinned down, he slips away again like one of his own spectres.” (p. 2, my emphasis) Elsewhere Newman asks, “Why, then, resurrect Max Stirner, the thinker who was obsessed with ghosts, “spooks,” and ideological apparitions….” in “Spectres of Freedom: Stirner and Foucault” (Postmodern Culture Vol.14, #3, May 2004).

3. “Hauntology” is one of those pomo jokes you couldn’t make up without feeling deeply embarrassed for yourself, but seem to be taken seriously by (too) many academics. The source is Derrida’s relatively incoherent Spectres of Marx.

4. This essay was originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #38, Fall 1993 (C.A.L. Press).

5. See my “John Clark’s Stirner,” published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #68/69 (undated) as “John Clark’s Spook,” and my introduction to Wolfi Landstreicher’s translation of Max Stirner’s Stirner’s Critics (LBC Books / CAL Press, 2012), “Clarifying the Unique and Its Self-Creation.” (Landstreicher’s translations in Stirner’s Critics include both the first full English translation of “Stirner’s Critics,” as well as a second English translation of “The Philosophical Reactionaries,” which appears to have been completed not long after –and unaware of – De Ridder’s translation.)